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I'm a longtime DM and curious how others handle this situation, either as players or as DMs. I'm usually pretty loose with party composition not being a big deal and, barring something really out of the ordinary, most NPCs in my worlds tend to be chill around different ancestries.
I'm starting to run a new campaign next week and my players have gone all out on weird characters: we have an Automaton (robot dude), Fleshwarp (mutated Cleric of Lamashtu!), a big ol' Minotaur, and a cursed Fetchling.
Would a weird party like this cause a stir in your settings, or is it just one more band of odd adventurers? Of course different NPCs will have a wide range of reactions; the centaur shopkeeper won't care but maybe the conservative elf farmer would see them as a threat.
Is it fun to constantly have regular folks on the street gawking at your weird character, or does the attention get old? I'm still preparing for our first session and debating how far to go on NPC reactions to these unusual characters. Any thoughts, suggestions, or stories of past experience would be welcome.
I have always played that adults in towns and larger are aware that 'people' come in lots of different shapes and sizes. The biggest hurdle is going from stranger to trusted, but ancestry doesn't usually affect that in the public sense, or interactions out and about. I only bring in NPC biases for private conversations and such. Kids will only stare if your ancestry is rare.
From there I use a modification of the 3.5 initial attitude chart. Harmful, hated, untrusted, indifferent, trusted, helpful, devoted
Once an NPC gets a name. I usually roll a 1d6 to determine their bias. (Human, beast, arcane, divine, gender, none.) Then flip a coin to see if it's a positive or negative bias.
Example the king might have a positive bias towards human like characters (elves, dwarves, humans, half Giants, halflings, etc) which would make the king easier to talk to by one step. If the party's face (who the king will assume is the leader.) is a "human".
The none bias still gets a positive or negative. A positive none is a happy outgoing person, (everyone starts at trusted with this NPC.) a negative none is a sullen reserved person who doesn't want to interact. (Everyone starts at untrusted.)
If the bias doesn't make sense. Like a church leader having a negative divine bias I'll usually just pick something that makes sense, or flip the result. It would make sense for a church leader to think better of churchly people, magic, and creations.
It definitely can be used that way, but the way I use it is for the PC's first interaction. My tables have asked for a variable start for each PC so this is my quick and easy solution.
So how I use it: it could be that the cleric wants to go talk to the head of the church. So I roll a quick bias to see how the head of the church initially feels about the party's characters individually based on nothing.
In this a negative divine head of the church would be distrusting of any clerics, paladins, and druids in the party initially and the cleric will have DC 12 checks over the fighters/wizards DC 10 when trying to persuade the head of the church to offer aid above what is generally offered. The will also have a harder time collecting on religious quests without gaining the heads trust.
It could be made to make sense of why the head of a church would treat random members of the Faith worse than those who don't, but in general it wouldn't make much sense, and unless I wanted to make that a larger plot I would probably just flip it to positive divine. Cleric DC 8 instead of DC 10.
For comparison. If the head of the church were negative beast,
Then a human fighter and elf cleric would be DC 10, but the catfolk paladin would be DC 12.
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Oh definitely. I actually developed this simple table off of the more complex NPC building tables that I like to use when actually fleshing out NPCs.
I think my favorite bias that actually got gameplay was an Arch druid who felt negatively against animalistic people. Animal in this context, meaning they have horns, hooves, wings, scales and other things that humans would not. So ancestry is like tiefling, cat folk, kobolds, and such.
Through gameplay it was developed that she had this bias because she was bullied in her youth by a yuan ti ranger, and with the party's help that druid got over her bias and ended up just being positive. None.